[132a]
“I fancy your reason for believing that each idea is one is something like this; when there is a number of things which seem to you to be great, you may think, as you look at them all, that there is one and the same idea in them, and hence you think the great is one.”“That is true,” he said.“But if with your mind's eye you regard the absolute great and these many great things in the same way, will not another great appear beyond, by which all these must appear to be great?”“So it seems.”“That is, another idea of greatness will appear, in addition to absolute greatness and the objects which partake of it;
[132b]
and another again in addition to these, by reason of which they are all great; and each of your ideas will no longer be one, but their number will be infinite.”“But, Parmenides,” said Socrates, “each of these ideas may be only a thought, which can exist only in our minds then each might be one, without being exposed to the consequences you have just mentioned.”“But,” he said, “is each thought one, but a thought of nothing?”“That is impossible,” he replied.“But of something?”“Yes.”
[132c]
“Of something that is, or that is not?”“Of something that is.”“A thought of some single element which that thought thinks of as appertaining to all and as being one idea?”“Yes.”“Then will not this single element, which is thought of as one and as always the same in all, be an idea?”“That, again, seems inevitable.”“Well then,” said Parmenides, “does not the necessity which compels you to say that all other things partake of ideas, oblige you also to believe either that everything is made of thoughts, and all things think, or that, being thoughts, they are without thought?”“That is quite unreasonable, too,” he said,
[132d]
“but Parmenides, I think the most likely view is, that these ideas exist in nature as patterns, and the other things resemble them and are imitations of them; their participation in ideas is assimilation to them, that and nothing else.”“Then if anything,” he said, “resembles the idea, can that idea avoid being like the thing which resembles it, in so far as the thing has been made to resemble it; or is there any possibility that the like be unlike its like?”“No, there is none.”“And must not necessarily the like partake of
[132e]
the same idea as its like?”“It must.”“That by participation in which like things are made like, will be the absolute idea, will it not?”“Certainly.”“Then it is impossible that anything be like the idea, or the idea like anything; for if they are alike, some further idea, in addition to the first, will always appear, and if that is like anything, still another,
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.